A New Beginning

 My name is Riley Fischer, and this is my first blog post... ever.

I have been interested in parsing techniques for a few years now, and this semester at college one of my classes has motivated me to write an interpreted language from scratch. Now I have to admit, I've been working on it for a few months now but am only just now getting around to writing about it.

The language isn't really intended to be a "useful" programming language, because its more of a project to allow me to combine the concepts that I'm learning in class with what I already knew. One of the most significant concepts that I learned is called "shift-reduce parsing". I've know about it for longer than this class, but only really understood the usefulness of it this semester.

One of my requirements for this language though is to not use a parser generator. As I want to learn how parsing works on a deeper level I figured it would be a good idea to write one completely from scratch... in C. Admittedly, its most likely taking quite a bit longer to get significant features implemented. But because I know exactly how the parser works from start to end, its quite simple to make changes and add more features to the language specification.

Because I've been working on it for a while, these posts won't have the entire context but my goal is to make daily blog posts covering what I learned or implemented that day. It is a completely open source project, and you can find it at Spaz (Github).

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